‘If we believe in the NHS, and feel – as I do – that it should embody the best of everything this country can offer, then we must act now.’
Photograph: Charlotte Graham/AP

From the days of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole to our chief medical officer for England, Professor Dame Sally Davies, women have played an integral part in the story of modern healthcare. Today, around 1 million female employees work for the NHS, making it one of the single biggest employers of women in the world. Without them, the NHS would be nothing.

NHS must close gender gaps and prioritise staff wellbeing - Hancock

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Yet despite doing around 80% of the life-saving and caring roles across our NHS, the uncomfortable truth is that women are paid less, promoted less and systematically under-represented among the top jobs. Overall, women in the NHS are paid 23% less than men, male GPs are paid one-third more than female GPs, and while half of junior doctors are women, at consultant level the number still falls away sharply to around a third.

This has to change – and I won’t rest until it has. The NHS will soon set out the interim steps towards creating its first ever “people plan”, a blueprint for how we grow and develop the workforce we need to support us in the future.

Part of the answer, of course, is getting more doctors and nurses into the NHS, and we’re doing everything we can to recruit more staff, including attracting the brightest and best from around the world. But, more immediately, we must retain the wonderfully talented people who already work within the NHS – and gender equality is critical to this, and vital to delivering on the pledges made in our NHS long-term plan.

So how do we do it? First, we need to get more women into senior leadership roles. Patients across the country owe much to the incredible leadership that female chief executives such as Dr Navina Evans, Clare Panniker and Marianne Griffiths are showing in guiding their organisations through challenging times. We need many more like them.

So I want to see more tailor-made training programmes, more brilliant role models speaking out to inspire and advise women, and better support networks to help women navigate their careers successfully within the NHS – including for those in the early stages of management who are the future leaders of the NHS.

Second, let’s improve the options for working parents across the NHS. The only legitimate barrier to a high-flying career in the NHS should be one’s ability – yet in practice one of the biggest is a lack of flexible working, which makes many roles within the NHS hard to balance with having a family. No mother, or father, should be made to feel that their job is incompatible with their family life. Yet too often the unpredictable rotas and long hours associated with the NHS puts parents in an incredibly difficult position. We need to create a working culture that truly embraces flexible working and encourages women to stay in the workforce and helps them move up the career ladder, even after career breaks to have children.

I believe we can do better than this by expanding the use of smart rotas which allow staff to put in their preferences and pick shifts that work for them, rather than feeling that the only way to get this flexibility is to leave the NHS to become agency workers.

The third thing we need to do is end the discrimination, bullying and harassment still taking place within the NHS. We’re lucky to have incredibly brave women such as Dr Zoe Norris and Dr Katie Bramall-Stainer speaking out about harassment by male colleagues. I am glad that the British Medical Association and the General Medical Council are treating these accusations with the seriousness they deserve. It’s now essential that we act decisively to eradicate this blot on our brilliant NHS.

Finally, perhaps most important of all, we need to make sure the NHS, which cares so well for us, also genuinely cares about its own people, treating them with the compassion they deserve – as human beings rather than human resources.

Under the NHSMeToo hashtag, the Doctors’ Association and courageous medical professionals have shared countless stories, from not getting time off to attend a wedding or funeral, to being told they had to work even when they were sick, to enduring personal tragedies such as miscarriages without support, empathy or basic human kindness.

If we believe in the NHS, and feel – as I do – that it should embody the best of everything this country can offer, then we must act now to end these shameful examples and make the NHS an outstanding employer for the 21st century.

By embracing more family-friendly practices, narrowing the gender pay gap and creating an NHS culture that acknowledges and supports diversity, we can take the first steps towards making the NHS stronger, fairer and better for all. Above all, we can start to build an NHS that truly works for everyone.

• Matt Hancock is a Conservative MP and the secretary of state for health